Meeting of the Parliament 22 March 2016
I enjoyed Nanette Milne’s valedictory speech, although she had me googling Nanette Newman to double check that I know who that is, and I do. Unfortunately, I am not that young; I just wanted to check that I was right.
I thank Nanette Milne for all her hard and diligent work on the Health and Sport Committee, which she was a member of, with me, for a number of years. I very much appreciate the constructive partnership approach that she took and I wish her the very best for the many years of her retirement outwith the Parliament. I suspect that she will be back to the real world rather than the bubble of Holyrood. I give her best wishes for her retirement.
I also thank all the witnesses who gave evidence to the Health and Sport Committee and the range of committees that took evidence on the bill. Most of all, I thank the families whom other MSPs and I met, who came forward bravely, fiercely and diligently to make their voices heard about the shortcomings in the service that should have been their due, that they expected and that should have been delivered to them when they had the most horrific experiences of their lives. They were let down by the organisational framework and people who failed in their service to them. I thank the parents who came forward to help to shape the bill.
I have written down a few words about what I think the bill is about. For me, it is about bereavement and loss as much as anything else. That thread runs through it all. When a person suffers bereavement and loss, it is about feeling in control and knowing that there is transparency and certainty in the process that they face, that there is compassion along the way, that there is sensitivity and flexibility to deal with the loss in the way that they see fit, and that they have that choice.
At the bottom of it all, there is also the expectation that when someone loses a loved one, they should be able to choose how that person’s remains are dealt with, and that there will be ashes, should they wish to have them. It is said that 99.9 per cent of the time we should expect to get the ashes of loved ones who have passed away. The bill should ensure that people can get them every time.
The legislation that underpinned things was archaic and fragmented, and, to be frank, it was poor and shoddy. The bill as amended at stage 3 provides a coherent statutory framework with which to take forward a modern way of dealing with these tragic events.
When we considered one of the stage 3 amendments, I intervened on the minister in relation to section 54A. The minister quite rightly said that the amendment that we were discussing did not refer to section 54A, but I wanted to make a point about pregnancy loss and situations in which pregnancy loss is expected. A powerful aspect of the bill is that it expects higher standards of care across the national health service when expectant mothers lose their babies, whether that happens before or after 24 weeks of pregnancy. They will be given the choices that too often they have been denied. I said during consideration of amendments that many mums are sent home and told that they can expect a miscarriage or pregnancy loss in the next week or so, and they have to deal with the pain and grief that surrounds that tragedy. Section 54A affords those mums the same choice, power, protection and control that others who go through similar horrific experiences have—they should always have had that.
We must build on the bill and we must look at the continuum of loss and bereavement, from when it happens in pregnancy to when it happens in old age. We must draw the issue right down to recurrent miscarriage and early pregnancy loss, how we deal with the mental health of expectant mums and how we support families in relation to that, and how we ensure that when they lose their unborn children, we deal with that loss in a very sensitive way that gives them the maximum amount of choice. The NHS has not always got that right.
The Parliament can legislate any way that it likes. The key aspects of this issue are empathy, respect and dignity, and the conversations that people have, whether that is NHS staff having conversations with mums who experience pregnancy loss or funeral directors having empathy and compassion in the discussions that they have with families who experience loss. We cannot legislate for those things; we have to hope that the human condition makes them happen in a positive and constructive way. We can, however, legislate for the framework that underpins all that. I hope that we do better in the years ahead than we have done in the past.